Maio Hin (Philip Joseph Silvera) is a master of snake-style kung fu who mesmerizes his opponents by rippling his hand like a snake's head, for instance, while Li Wen Mao (R. Scott Parker) is an over-the-top Cantonese opera artist and practitioner of crane-style kung fu.
Part art-world spectacle, part opera, artist Matthew Barney's latest work is a zombie movie musical featuring Norman Mailer, Egyptian mythology – and an oboe-playing porn star.
They include the classic American musical "Show Boat" in the operatic season and concerts by non-opera artists like Sting.
In a more luxuriously sentimental vein, there's Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of "La Bohème," the beloved Puccini opera about artists, consumption and sexual jealousy in a garret.
Giacomo Puccini's La bohème (1896) presents tuberculosis as social commentary and features characters new to opera, street artists living with poverty and disease.
Friends included Andy Warhol, for whom he took part in a soap opera the artist had devised.
Surtitles are welcome but almost redundant since each of the four singers – Richard Sherratt, Ben McAteer (a Scottish Opera emerging artist), Steven Page and Rachel Kelly – enunciate clearly.
The cafe's popularity is a reflection of Mr. Cioffi's efforts to promote cultural tourism: regular concerts, operas, and artists' residencies are organized throughout the year in a nearby church, renovated as part of the project.
